Pinterest announced AI-powered updates for its boards feature on Monday, with a new look and upgrades aimed at offering users a more personalized and relevant experience. With Pinterest now capable of picking up more subtle signals about user interests, including their aesthetics and preferred boards, advertisers can now better appear in contexts that are more aligned with user mindsets.
Wayfair extended its 2025 winning streak with Q3 earnings that far outpaced expectations, posting 70 cents per share and $3.12 billion in revenues, driven by rising orders and strong US demand. The retailer’s strategic pillars—Wayfair Rewards, Wayfair Verified, and new physical stores—continue to enhance customer loyalty and omnichannel strength. AI innovation, including its Muse engine and Discover tab, is boosting engagement and conversion. Despite housing headwinds and tariff pressures, Wayfair’s results underscore resilience, though sustaining momentum amid tightening consumer budgets remains a challenge.
Amazon is cutting 14,000 roles from its corporate workforce as it reshapes its organization to prepare for an agentic AI future. The layoffs are unusual for a company still posting strong growth, but Amazon framed them as part of a broader move to gain efficiencies from genAI. While most retailers have thus far refrained from citing AI as a reason for mass layoffs, that could change as tariff pressures and other headwinds force companies to cut costs—and headcount—where possible.
OpenAI detailed new ChatGPT mental health safety measure results on Monday, alongside an internal analysis that shows potentially millions of users’ conversations indicate emotional reliance on the chatbot. Marketers should educate parents of teens and young adults about safe AI use, and emphasize best practices like clinician collaboration, backup safety measures, and transparent data policies to build credibility and trust.
Amazon cut 14,000 corporate roles on Tuesday, calling the cuts an effort toward “reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets,” per Bloomberg. Affected divisions include gaming, cloud computing, logistics, and others. It’s been a challenging year for the workforce with rising inflation and a softening labor market—to say nothing of AI. Whether a company is looking to avoid layoffs or streamline operations, they should experiment with multiple AI tools to find the right solutions for specific roles and companies, even if that means learning that AI isn’t right for them.
Elon Musk’s X has lost another key figure in its advertising business, with ad chief John Nitti announcing his departure last week after joining just ten months ago, per the Financial Times. Another key loss signals that X’s ad strategy remains turbulent—and until its AI-powered ad focus proves valuable, ad investment should be executed with an air of caution.
Coca-Cola and Hershey’s are redefining what innovation looks like for century-old brands. Both companies are building repeatable systems for creativity rather than chasing trends. Coca-Cola created a proprietary AI-driven design system that converts brand rules into machine-readable code, allowing global teams to scale creative consistency instantly. Hershey’s built feedback loops that turn employee empathy and standardized KPIs into actionable insights. Together, they illustrate how legacy CPGs can combine data discipline with creative freedom—using structure to accelerate, not stifle, imagination. Innovation, they argue, isn’t chaos; it’s a system you can build.
OpenAI will reportedly expand its portfolio to include genAI music tools, per The Information. The company is said to be collecting data, such as annotated music scores, from Juilliard School students to develop and refine upcoming music-generation tools. CMOs should assess their tech infrastructure to ensure that teams have the skills and systems to integrate new AI tools smoothly. Maintain agency relationships amid AI-generated audio experimentation to keep human creativity in the loop and retain oversight as AI adoption heats up.
Rates of adoption and familiarity with AI are surging—53% of US consumers either regularly use genAI or have experimented with it, per Deloitte’s 2025 Connected Consumer Survey, up from 38% in 2024 and 16% in 2023. Sixty-nine percent of US genAI users engage with AI through social apps, everyday software, and online services. Companies should look beyond customer service chatbots and integrate AI-powered search, product discovery, and personalization tools into brand websites. Boost intelligent tools such as AI personal shopping assistants to increase engagement and time spent, removing the need to navigate elsewhere to find answers or recommendations.
Consumers believe the use of AI makes it harder to detect scams, according to a recently published report from risk-management fintech Alloy. It also found that fraud prevention and security measures are top factors for 97% of respondents when they choose a bank. Customer trust is paramount to a financial institution’s survival, and anything that erodes that trust can prompt them to switch or avoid certain banks altogether. With AI changing the scam landscape dramatically in just a few years, banks must accordingly invest in modern technology—including their own AI tools—and customer education.
Holding company WPP launched WPP Open Pro on Thursday, a self-serve AI tool piloted by Google and other clients that creates ad campaigns from start to finish in a push to attract small businesses. WPP’s newest move means marketers can continue to expect greater automation, cost savings, and a shift in agency relationships.
ChatGPT is less effective at converting shoppers than nearly all traditional channels except paid social, according to a working paper by researchers from the University of Hamburg and the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. That finding is consistent with EMARKETER’s latest report on AI search, which shows that traditional search engines continue to dominate discovery. Retailers should certainly be thinking about how to optimize their websites and listings for discovery on generative AI engines—but those efforts shouldn’t come at the expense of SEO, since the vast majority of shoppers continue to surface products via Google and other traditional channels.
Marketers are doubling down on content relevance and strategy as key drivers of performance, but personalization is being left behind. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of North American B2B marketers who say their efforts have been effective in the past year cite content relevance as a main reason, per Content Marketing Institute (CMI). Despite the potential payoff, 94% of marketers say their use of personalization is either basic or moderate. Marketers should pivot AI’s role from content creation to content intelligence, focus on high-quality signals, and implement data-driven personalization to get a sustainable edge in campaign efficiency and engagement.
Approximately 35% of US adults report using AI tools to learn about and manage aspects of their health and wellness, according to a recent study conducted by The Vitamin Shoppe and Talker Research. As more people grow to trust AI for health information, they may move away from social media and influencer-driven health content that they have never found very reliable. Consumers will increasingly value AI that links to verifiable sources over social videos that often lack accountability. Healthcare and pharma marketers shouldn’t make any drastic pivot away from social media, but should closely track shifts in how consumers engage with social and influencer health content.
Half of oncologists note their cancer patients are turning to AI tools for information before, during, and after their diagnosis and treatment, according to a recent survey of oncologists from Impiricus and Klick Health. As patients adopt more AI for health information, pharma marketers have a growing opportunity to help physicians navigate the new dynamic. Marketers can offer physicians training on how to discuss and correct AI-generated information, and by providing credible, easy-to-understand resources grounded in evidence.
Spectrum Reach and Waymark are scaling their AI-powered creative partnership, which has already supported over 15,000 ad campaigns for small and midsize businesses. The collaboration blends Spectrum Reach’s data-driven media targeting with Waymark’s AI video creation tools, enabling broadcast-quality commercials in minutes. The expansion comes as 55% of US small businesses now use AI, up from 39% last year. Together, Spectrum Reach and Waymark are redefining local advertising, proving AI can make creative faster, smarter, and fairer.
On today’s podcast episode, we discuss what OpenAI as the next big operating system maker looks like, how they might make money from this, which integrated apps will become most popular inside ChatGPT, and how this potential super app could impact consumer AI devices. Join Senior Director of Podcasts and host, Marcus Johnson, Analyst, Grace Harmon, and Principal Analyst, Yory Wurmser. Listen everywhere and watch on YouTube and Spotify.
Google and Anthropic inked a cloud partnership that could put Amazon Web Services (AWS) on notice and raise the stakes for the stability and services Anthropic will offer enterprise and consumer customers in the future. The deal gives Anthropic access to up to 1 million of Google’s custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), per CNBC. To remain resilient against outages and capitalize on the fast-moving development of AI models, companies should diversify AI bets, shift AI use from output to intelligence, and ask vendors to explain infrastructure choices.
Amazon is introducing “Help Me Decide,” an AI-powered shopping feature that recommends the best product for users comparing similar items. The tool analyzes browsing patterns, search history, and purchase behavior to offer personalized suggestions, along with explanations based on customer reviews and key features. Initially rolling out to millions of US shoppers, it joins Amazon’s growing lineup of AI-driven tools like Interests, Shopping Guides, and Rufus. While Amazon and rivals such as Google, Meta, and OpenAI are all racing to integrate AI into ecommerce, the industry is still testing which approach will truly enhance the shopping experience.
Alphabet subsidiary Verily is launching a free health app offering personalized guidance from clinicians. The Verily Me app will also have an AI agent to answer people’s health questions based on their medical records. Verily’s competitive advantage over bigger companies with brand-name is that it has clinician partners and access to some medical record data. The company should leverage its network of doctors to endorse Verily Me to their patients, using real-world examples to demonstrate the benefit of combining a person’s health history with a medical expert’s view for individualized guidance.